I’ve been making interesting things on the internet for two decades. As a writer, I shapeshifted from music to games to internet culture to digital media more broadly. As an editor, I started developing writers before I got really into operational oversight and finally creative direction. And when all that led to marketing work, I discovered strategy may be the thing I like most of all: talking to people, learning, presenting ideas, and helping people pull them off. Early Drake apologist, cavity-free for four decades, winner of my third-grade spelling bee.
A cultural-intelligence studio. We help platforms and brands understand where culture is actually moving — games, music, the creator economy, the internet at large — and what to do about it. We’ve consulted on some of the world’s most important algorithms and developed videos viewed by millions.
I was handed a viral section that minted pageviews but no one liked. I turned it into a critical and journalistic channel the staff could be proud of — rigorously sourcing and reporting stories, recruiting new writers, and writing gonzo headlines that lit up Twitter.
When the beloved print magazine jumped to a full website, I built the operation that made it run — on a shoestring. It worked so well we launched two sub-sites, a well-received annual conference, and — hey — a successful Kickstarter to bring back the print pub.
I work with teams at YouTube on gaming and creator culture: where attention is moving, why some things go viral and others vanish. It ranges from biweekly trend reports read inside the company to research that shapes how the platform talks about itself.
Ran strategy and creative for an 80-plus-article initiative for Intel’s gaming arm — how-tos, explainers, the works. Gamers smell marketing instantly, so we built a no-nonsense voice and art good enough to earn the click, and held it across all eighty. The goal was to be “Reddit-proof” — and we never got flamed once.
I joined Groupon the day they turned down Google’s acquisition offer, which meant I caught the rocketship as it soared toward an IPO. The word of the second was scaling: how do you make great copy for hundreds of deals a day? I was entrusted with the multibillion-dollar product pipeline.
The cultural hotspot knew it wanted to engage more with games but didn’t know how. We developed and deployed a massive user survey, then turned it into strategy and creative recommendations to better wed the two worlds.
I cut my teeth in the webzine era, writing wildly indulgent music criticism for a pioneering blog. So beloved it got anthologized in a beautiful print edition I was asked to edit. Vulture called it “unruly” and “brilliant.”